tkdguy
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Post by tkdguy on Aug 17, 2015 8:12:47 GMT
This article claims the original Traveller rpg had a hard SF (but with interstellar travel), film noir feel to it. I have used the system for my near-future, hard SF game, but I've never thought of adding noir elements. Now it's got me thinking. I'm thinking of starting a campaign like that. The thought of hard-boiled detectives traveling from one planet to another to solve mysteries or to escape gangsters who operate in a certain star system appeals to me. Of course, most Traveller characters start out as drifters without too much cash, looking for work (and some trouble along the way). That sounds like film noir already. Details in the future.
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tkdguy
Double Digit Master
Posts: 47
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Post by tkdguy on Aug 17, 2015 8:15:22 GMT
Also, there was a thread in another forum that compares the Firefly series to the Traveller rpg. The site is currently offline for maintenance, so I'll post it later.
Edit: Posting discussions on a different forum may be against the rules of my other discussion board, so I'll post another link instead.
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tkdguy
Double Digit Master
Posts: 47
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Post by tkdguy on Aug 19, 2015 4:38:12 GMT
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Lou Goncey
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Read more. Write more. Whine less.
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Post by Lou Goncey on Apr 25, 2017 22:28:42 GMT
At the time I began playing CT, the Alien film was out for three years -- CT always had a "noir" feel to it. ALIEN dominated our rpg sessions...
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Post by rravenwood on Jun 26, 2022 21:43:25 GMT
I've slowly (very slowly) been reading through Classic Traveller in something approaching chronological order (order of publication as best I can figure out or guess). I had a few experiences with it waaaay back in the day, but they were never anything that went very far, and I never owned the rulebooks. It's interesting to see it begin as something of a blank slate toolbox - not truly a blank slate, but as compared to how the game became after GDW decided to start introducing the Imperium setting, the original '77 edition was very wide open.
So far I've made it up through the original 1979 version of High Guard (I have the FFE CT CD-ROM), and one thought which struck me is that the difference between characters generated from Book 1 vs. characters generated by the "extended" or "advanced" systems presented in Mercenary & High Guard would, in HERO terms (hey, this is a HERO board!) probably be a difference in starting points, like the old "Talented Normal" vs. "Hero" distinction made in older games like DI or FH.
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Duke
Triple Digit Mad Dog
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Posts: 162
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Post by Duke on Jun 27, 2022 23:32:25 GMT
Several things, Sir: First, if you ever wondered about the Skill Explosion in Traveller: Miller did not see Skills rolls as the dominant means of resolution. Miller saw the Characteristic Roll as being the dominant means of doing pretty much anything. Skills were rare because they represented something in which you were intensely and extensively trained-- that is to say that you were much better than the typical person at this particular thing. He also saw it-- as can be told by some of the definitions in 1e-- as a means of determining not just how good you were at that skill, but how much you knew about that field over-all. Gaining a new skill level didn't just make you better at Skill X; it unlocked more aspects of that skill. I told this story to Chris Goodwin a while back: A few decades ago, I had the good fortune to watch Miller run a game at a convention. (I entered both lotteries (he was running two games) but didn't manage to get a seat in either one.) His skill resolution was quite literally letting the player pick the characteristic against which he was going to check for success. You heard that right: the player picked the Characteristic. If it wasn't an obvious thing (I attempt to force open the door! I check against Strength!), then he required you to _briefly_ justify your choice. Note that he did _not_ turn it down-- not once; not ever. He required you to justify the use of that Characteristic before rolling. Moreover, you could not use that Characteristic again until you had cycled through _all_ of your Characteristics. Whether or not you had a skill or knew how to do something was based entirely on your perception of your character and his past. Just to give an example, here is the one that smacked me in gob: Pirate ship is attacking. Ship's gunner (NPC) is down, and the PC attempting to man the gun has used all of his Characteristics except for Social Standing (in which he had a 12). Miller asks what Characteristic he is going to use to determine his ability / success with the ship's gun. The only one left was SS. The player got sheepish, and took a moment, and finally he says "Social Standing." Okay; how does that apply? "The weaponry is similar to that on my grandfather's yacht. When I was a young lad, we would often fly out to the rings and spend an afternoon shooting rocket skeet....?" "Okay. Roll 'em." I was stymied for a long time after that, even after he generously sacrificed his free time between games doing an impromptu Q and A, which helped frame how he had envisioned things working, and it was really interesting. Skills were for your 'beyond professional" abilities, as he originally saw it. Characteristic Rolls had no inherent negative DMs as they would come to have in the final products. Through the filter of years in the hobby, I realize now that this was much simpler-- not quite freeform, but much simpler, and honestly, it added a serious depth to the character that spun itself into improved role play and character development and interaction. It was really quite beautiful, and I wasn't mature enough to grasp that at the time.  It was also the reason that every character had a previous career-- it was intended more to get you thinking about who your character was than anything else, and the reward was a couple of skills at which you were _extremely_ proficient, and they could be used in place of Characteristics rolls-- evidently he originally saw them as "bonus rolls" when you were really wanting to save that one particular Characteristic for a bigger challenge... His group quibbled a bit during the writing, and what 1e and 2e were was essentially the compromise that all involved could agree on. Now I do _not_ expect anyone to take my word for this, or Jeff's word (another member of the group I was in-- we had gone to visit a third friend specifically to attend this con). Somewhere on the net just a couple of years ago I stumbled across an interview with Marc Miller where he states more or less this same thing. There is also an interview with Joe Fugate (the driving force behind DGP) in which he mentions this as well. I can _probably_ lay my hands on the Fugate interview, if pressed, but I'm not entirely certain. He went on to explain that the "expanded character generation" came about as a combination of two things: Fans didn't really pick up on what he had envisioned (I know I didn't, but in fairness to all of us, an RPG with "skills" was a fairly new thing back in '77), and the demanded more and more and more-- kind of like how HERO's rules bloat came about: different people interpreted things to differing degrees, and many of them simply needed the assurance of a rule that explicitly said 'yes' or 'no.' The other thing was that GDW was a game company, which means it was a publisher, which means that there would come a point where everyone who wanted a copy of Traveller would have one, leaving GDW out to dry. A game company is like any other publisher: Publish or Die. Fans were clamoring for more rules, more details during Character Creation-- and of course, clamoring for something is a good indication that they will buy it, right? Publish or Die. Now, for other things: I stumbled across a Journal of TAS the other day (not mine, or I would cite it for you) and that particular issue contained the "errata' for computers for 1e. It was offered for players of 1e to avoid having to buy 2e to get the whole package. The entire layout looks like the handout I mentioned to you on the counter of my (then) game store. It leads me to suspect that the handouts were literal xeroxes of that article directly from the magazine (I told you the font "looked legit"  ). There was errata published for a couple of incarnations of Traveller in the JTAS, and more published in Challenge Magazine. I recall an issue of Challenge (I didn't collect it, as it had spread to cover _all_ GDW games and a couple of others (FASA Star Trek, Call of C'Thullu, Shadowrun, etc, etc). It tried to be "all the sci-fi games," but that's just not possible. Don't get me wrong: production values were _great_; there was just too much coverage of stuff I didn't want and not enough of what I did want)-- this particular issue had an article from Miller that casually mentioned GDW regular producing and distributing errata booklets, publishing errata in game magazines (to include Challenge, of course; JTAS had been subsumed into that publication by then), and even making available "update booklets" when newer editions of games came out: you could get a free booklet that would give you all the info you needed to update your older version to the most current version. That was really above and beyond what anyone was doing at the time. That's about all I could find you for you, Sir, but if you want to pony up for the disc at FFE, I bet you can get those articles. |
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Post by rravenwood on Jun 29, 2022 0:05:41 GMT
Not that I wouldn't take your word for it, but the blog post here corroborates your account of Miller's characteristic-centered approach to refereeing, as well as a lot of other interesting bits - it might be the one you were thinking of. I see what Miller is after with his approach, encouraging creativity. It might take me a while to warm up to it and for it not to feel kind of forced, if I were to play in such a game, but that's just me - my initial reaction is that the "you can't use a characteristic again until you've cycled through all of them once" part would start to feel constraining after a while. But again, I do appreciate the intent.
Regarding Classic Traveller as-published, and the addition of skills over time, it really does... foreshadow is not the right word, but my sleep-deprived brain isn't coming up with a better one... foreshadow what happened with HERO. I agree with your reasons why. Fortunately, the same solution is applicable to both games, as I know you already know  : Just because the published material has X-dozen different skill definitions doesn't mean a referee / GM can't cut that down to just what they want to deal with in their own game.
Circling back to Books 4 and 5, my own take on Mercenary is that it's really a kind of sub-genre book: for games centered on mercenaries and tickets and such, here are ways to generate characters more in line with that focus, and here are some bits of framework which can be used to help support such games (tickets, recruiting, hiring on, all that ironmongery, etc.). Of course while, just like any publication, it's a toolbox to be used however an individual referee / game group wishes to, I do suspect it was probably taken a bit too literally as part of the "core rules" ("gee, it's Book 4, after all, and not a 'Supplement'"). I think it was maybe a little ahead of its time, in a very limited way, in that perhaps GDW didn't quite know what other category to assign it to aside from "Book" - I have no idea if "sourcebook" was even an idea at that point in history.
High Guard, IMHO, was more of a straightforward case of "gee, Mercenary's character system was popular, so let's do the same for Navy", but it otherwise wasn't approached as the same type of beast. High Guard really doesn't provide the same kind of framework bits to help support a campaign for ex-Navy or (even better) actual still-in-service Navy characters. Imaginative referees can always come up with such on their own, yes, but just like how the three core LBBs provided structure for things like world and animal generation, patrons, random encounters, etc. - none strictly necessary, but there to make the game more playable out of the box - if HG gave comparable support for Navy-themed games as Mercenary did for merc-themed games, it would have been interesting and more of a counterpart to its predecessor. Instead, the rest of the book provides a very abstract wargame, moving the focus even farther away from the player characters. I absolutely allow that some game groups may have been tickled pink by the new ship combat material, and were provided with hours of entertainment designing and pitting whole fleets against each other; it's just that all that could very well have been left for a separate book, which could have then included suggestions for bringing the new weapons, defenses, etc. down into Book 2 scale, so refs could have it both ways: abstracted HG combats using the USPs, or the ability to bring the likes of meson guns, etc. into Book 2 designs and ship combats. Again, just my armchair-reader impressions.
As far as errata goes, I do have the FFE JTAS disc too. Aside from the Computer Programming article in #1 you mention, they did also publish (in three parts) the new material for the revised second edition of High Guard; there may be more, but I'm still working through them  I have found that Mercenary has some errata buried away in the Ironmongery chapter (vehicle price reductions and armor TL corrections), and so won't be surprised if I find other nuggets tucked away in various books as I slowly proceed. As I probably mentioned in some previous message elsewhere, if GDW did make errata sheets and booklets available during the early Classic Traveller years, I'm surprised that references to and scans of such aren't in places such as the Traveller Wiki and RPGGeek.com. Floods of contemporary errata seem to be online for later games such as MegaTraveller, but as you opined to me once, formal errata just didn't seem to be a feature of the early RPG years.
Any hoo, that's about as much as my tired self can semi-coherently string together for now.
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Duke
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Posts: 162
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Post by Duke on Jun 29, 2022 1:02:17 GMT
---Not that I wouldn't take your word for it, but the blog post here corroborates your account of Miller's characteristic-centered approach to refereeing, Wow! Thanks! Honestly, that is not the interview I was thinking of, but I suppose when you are a game designer at a gaming convention, the press has pretty similar questions-- you know: stuff about your game. I say "thanks" because it's always nice to see proof that your memory isn't failing once you get past 60. (Or perhaps there was a moment a few years ago when I became prescient, and this is the interview I read then, across space and time? HA!). The one I read was from some point in the 90s, when the internet was still mostly wild private pages and horrible color schemes (and so much blue text on black that I was pretty sure humanity deserved the next asteroid.... ). Still, very similar stuff. Forgive the old-school method of quote delineation: I haven't sussed out the proper controls here yet-- . I won't say I am _proud_ of it, but I find no shame in confessing my computer ignorance.  -- It might take me a while to warm up to it and for it not to feel kind of forced, "It does" on all counts, Sir. I've tried it several times, and can confirm that it takes a while to warm up to it. It went so _easy_ at the con games, so I really wanted to try it. I hadn't considered the fact that Miller had been doing it for years, learning to smooth out problems before they arose, and I had failed to consider Miller's "star power" in making it immediately successful for the lucky players who won the lottery to sit in on the games. You don't have that star power at home. At some point, you and your buddies have gamed together in a converted single-car garage, and you had the seat at the table that required ten minutes of squeezing to get in and out of, and there came that one time that you really, really _believed_ you could slip that fart out all quiet-like and no one would ever know, but halfway through, you failed miserably, and ended up perhaps even out-trumping the horns that tumbled Jericho..... After that, you just don't get that level of star power from your players anymore. lol (the good news is that if you get in a tight and fart on your players, they will forgive you in a couple of months. They won't _forget_, mind you, but they will forgive you). -----if I were to play in such a game, but that's just me - my initial reaction is that the "you can't use a characteristic again until you've cycled through all of them once" part would start to feel constraining after a while. But again, I do appreciate the intent. I won't lie: it does. Weirdly, it doesn't stay that way. Seriously: the more you do it, the more you get used to it, and the more you start to _enjoy_ these thousand little moments to pop a detail or two into your character. Granted, it might just be a certain sort of person: I am a writer and an extrovert, so I can see me both being more comfortable with it and more excited by it than someone with neither of these traits. (the biggest challenges, I swear, are Social Standing and Intelligence. Not because Intelligence is handicapped, but because every time you find the perfect opportunity for an INT roll, you've already used INT. ugh. "Okay, there's a massive stone cube, two meters to a side, blocking your path. How do you move it?" With my... Intelligence? "Okay; how?" Granted, Social Standing is pretty rough in that situation, too.) However, it should be noted that it requires a referee who is willing to be very lax with the background of the individual scenes: "I find some branches and set about using my dagger to shave them into rollers, then use a larger log to lever the stone onto them" No problem. It takes a few minutes, but you just happen to find enough green limbs here in the Sahara to make rollers and a lever.... See what I mean? Now I would like to say that I don't actually play Traveller that way-- well, not all the time, I mean, and not rigidly. Overall, knowing that it is how the original rules were conceived, and having played with it a lot with my old Traveller group, I am quite comfortable with it, and to this day I don't automatically add negative DMs for using a raw Characteristics Roll the way later editions of Traveller did. A bit off-topic, but here is something I started doing I-can't-remember-how-long-ago when trying to recruit a new group to Traveller: Preface: You have recently read the earliest editions, so you know what I mean when I say that additional levels of a Skill didn't always mean that you were better at; sometimes they meant you knew more, or had access to new abilities. This addresses that: Given that in Classic Traveller, it's pretty hard to get even Skill:5, and given that modern gamers who use more modern games are all used to the idea that the Skill level _is_ the bonus to your roll, or in some way figured directly to the math for using the Skill, it can be difficult to make them understand that it may instead-- or even _also_ -- mean that you have a wider set of Skills from that skill, or a wider field of knowledge. To represent that, when someone asks me "I have Skill:2; can I do X?" The first thing I do is ask about their background: What was your career(s)? Does it seem like something you would have picked up-- that particular bit of knowledge or unusual application of the skill? (Keep in mind, I don't do this all the time: it's just for new and interesting ideas for using the Skill or having knowledge about the field in which the Skill applies. Further, if I have determined that the character's skill level is sufficient for him to do X, we go straight to the die roll. This is for the really outlier questions-- what HERO fans tend to insist you need Power Skill to do kind of things (I don't use that, either-- never have; never will. They are your powers, and if what you are wanting to do fits into what you can already do, let's just work it out on the fly). Anyway, roll 1D6. if you roll your Skill Level or under, the answer is yes-- you know how to apply this skill to do something tangential, at least in this case, or you _do_ have that bit of odd knowledge about the field, etc. I like to assign a DM based on the characteristic most closely-relevant to the skill as well-- usually a DM-1 for a 10+ in the relevant characteristic _for the task at hand_. But I have gone on long enough; on to the next thing!
----Regarding Classic Traveller as-published, and the addition of skills over time, it really does... foreshadow is not the right word, but my sleep-deprived brain isn't coming up with a better one... foreshadow what happened with HERO. I agree with your reasons why. Thank you, but it is important to me that you understand that I mean _absolutely no insult_ to anyone who didn't intuit the same things that I or anyone else did, or who didn't feel comfortable with a leash or more than a certain length, etc. People are different, and I tend to believe that it is for a _reason_. No; not some great philosophical reason (though I suppose that could be true), but just a survival of the species thing: you _need_ someone who can obsessively keep watch for hours on end; you _need_ someone who believes that he can climb a tree and get the fruit and not get hurt. You _need_ someone who refuses to go into a dark cave, etc, etc, ad nauseum. ----------Fortunately, the same solution is applicable to both games, as I know you already know : Just because the published material has X-dozen different skill definitions doesn't mean a referee / GM can't cut that down to just what they want to deal with in their own game. For what it's worth, my personal "sweet spot" for Traveller is The Traveller Book. Yes: I reference 2e more than any other edition, but that's just because it's easier if you know which book to look into, and I like the box.... (not ashamed of it: I miss the days when games were thinnish books that came in a box, with a map, and maybe a couple of dice. Hell, I've still got my Traveller 2300 dice; I never even opened the bag! HA!)
---Circling back to Books 4 and 5, my own take on Mercenary is that it's really a kind of sub-genre book: for games centered on mercenaries and tickets and such, here are ways to generate characters more in line with that focus, and here are some bits of framework which can be used to help support such games (tickets, recruiting, hiring on, all that ironmongery, etc.). Of course while, just like any publication, it's a toolbox to be used however an individual referee / game group wishes to, I do suspect it was probably taken a bit too literally as part of the "core rules" ("gee, it's Book 4, after all, and not a 'Supplement'"). I think it was maybe a little ahead of its time, in a very limited way, in that perhaps GDW didn't quite know what other category to assign it to aside from "Book" - I have no idea if "sourcebook" was even an idea at that point in history. I don't disagree with you, though I have a personal fondness for Book6: Scouts. Be warned, though: that book needed a _massive_ rewrite! I had recently forgotten that while making a Scout Character, and let me tell you: the frustration is comical if you are on the outside of it. And Miller wrote that one himself, according to everything I can find. Solid stuff, and it lets you add a lot to your background without actually trying, but Holy Hell does it need a rewrite. High Guard got one; I never understood why Scouts didn't.
------As far as errata goes, I do have the FFE JTAS disc too. Aside from the Computer Programming article in #1 you mention, they did also publish (in three parts) the new material for the revised second edition of High Guard; there may be more, but I'm still working through them I have found that Mercenary has some errata buried away in the Ironmongery chapter (vehicle price reductions and armor TL corrections), and so won't be surprised if I find other nuggets tucked away in various books as I slowly proceed. As I probably mentioned in some previous message elsewhere, if GDW did make errata sheets and booklets available during the early Classic Traveller years, I'm surprised that references to and scans of such aren't in places such as the Traveller Wiki and RPGGeek.com. Floods of contemporary errata seem to be online for later games such as MegaTraveller, but as you opined to me once, formal errata just didn't seem to be a feature of the early RPG years.
Any hoo, that's about as much as my tired self can semi-coherently string together for now. Always a pleasure, Sir! |
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Post by rravenwood on Jul 1, 2022 0:38:44 GMT
Thanks for sharing your approaches for CT skills, using Characteristic rolls, etc. It's all good food for thought! I think (at least in more, uh, traditional systems) that when characters are defined both by characteristics and skills, it only makes sense that there should be some interaction between the two, where appropriate. For example, Book 1 suggests that trying to utilize Mechanical skill on very large objects might allow for positive DMs based on high Strength, while small delicate devices might have DMs based on high Dexterity. Having that openness to bring more aspects of a character to bear on a problem seems like it would not only just make better in-game sense, but can also help prevent disconnects which might sour a player on things: "Whaddya mean my high Education score doesn't mean diddly-squat when I'm trying to use my Administrative expertise to fast-track our research request through the Subsector Library Bureau?" Some of the HERO books over the years (can't remember exactly which at the moment) have made suggestions about changing up the Characteristic used for a CHA-based skill depending on the situation, which would be a similar kind of approach. (Of course, a certain type of player might be inclined to try and shoehorn their strongest attributes into applying to every situation they find themselves in - if they go about it with a lot of creativity and a sense of adding to the fun, then cool, but if they're just trying to be a dick about it in order to milk every last drop of advantage for themselves, then they might find themselves dis-invited back to the game sessions...) You're not the only person who holds The Traveller Book in high regard - it seems to be a recommendation made pretty widely to folks as a great entry into CT. I'll get that far in my reading at some point When I do, I'll hopefully be better able to appreciate it from the context of having read both the 1977 and 1981 editions.
I'm looking forward to Book 6: Scouts when I get that far - system and world generation are a couple particular things which I did always find to be entertaining; even though attempts by my old group to sustain a Traveller game always fell flat, I made photocopies of some of the relevant tables (probably from MegaTraveller, at that point) and would go back to it now and again to generate stuff just for my own solo enjoyment. When you say that Scouts badly needed a rewrite, is that because it has a lot of typos and bad grammar, etc., or that some of the systems presented within it weren't polished enough (or even flat out broken), or all of the above?
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Duke
Triple Digit Mad Dog
Affable Moron
Posts: 162
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Post by Duke on Jul 1, 2022 22:28:02 GMT
Man, do I hate to say this, but prepare to be disappointed with Book 6: Scouts. Yes, you have been warned that the writing / layout is kind of a mess- doable, especially if you kind of make a flow list for yourself, but still... Well, it needed an editor, really. The disappointment is the world-building /system building mechanics. There is a huge bias toward certain results (dwarf stars comes to mind), but honestly, I had been playing the game for fidteen years before I came to really appreciate how lop-sided it is. For example, one day I learned that before a star becomes a white dwarf, it spends a couple of billion years as a red giant, which makes it a bit harder to accept the number of white dwarfs with habitable planets in the right regions- regions that were once entirely within the heliosphere of a red giant..... Since that discovery, I have wanted to re-work that chart, but I havent the correct sort of education. I had toyed a few years back with the notion of approaching Cancer on the official board for his thoughts, but the time /opportunity /focus were never all three aligned during my active periods over there. I found some bits and pieces on the net over the years, but nit a completely redone chart. Most promising was a list of "problems" with the current charts, and reasons they were wonky, but not so much as a suggestion towards improving them. Ultimately, I fell back on Miller's comments that the rules were for those momenta when imagination and cooperation faltered, and I settled for rolling up systems and worlds and just tweaking them from there. Now, that being said, let me say this: I have not yet read T4 or T5; this problem may be a non-issue for the more current rules sets, which may be why I have never seen it more deeply addressed. My absolute least favorite edition was MegaTraveller. I am not a huge fan of 2300 (though I liked it more than Mega), but Mega is, _to me_, and who am I?- the low spot for Traveller. It is by far the most skill-frenzied- you know what? Let's not chace that target. There are lots of reasons- from the mechanical to the conceptual- that I dont like Mega. _However_, (and I wish I still had mine), the World Builder's Handbook (Guide?) for MegaTraveller is by far the most superior offering from the Traveller I have read and played (up to New Era; I didn't know about Mongoose until it was out of print, and it was researching Mongoose that lead me,to discover there had been two editions of a GURPS Traveller, which was _long_ out of print by then. I think I may have liked the GURPS one, as Wiseman decided that Strephon did not get assassinated, thus no "REVOLUTION!!" That was the End all, Be all of Mega). I remember not being able to afford T4 when it was new, and that actually had physical pain with it: it was branded "Marc Miller's Traveller," for Pete's sake! I thought for absolutely certain that "this must be the final, perfected version of Traveller that Miller imagined way back in the early days! This must be the way he meant the game,to be presented!" Yeah, I got sucked up in my own fanboyism there. Half a minute of objective thought would have pointed out that this book was _massive_, and Miller was a minimalist (as I have considerable respect for him and have always enjiyed his participation on the other board, I have never pointed out to Ruggles (who is also a Traveller fan) when he mentions "new fangled minimalism" in games that the first minimalist game was published in 1977. ). There was no way that this massive time was Miller's purified version of the game. Subsequent releases made the point for me: all of it Imperium-related, and Miller has openly admitted that he is a bit ambivalent about the Imperium, and most of it is the work of DGP, further fleshed out by other fans. It was a while before it hit me "yes; Traveller as an IP does indeed belong to Marc Miller, and he is probably the guy who wrote this book, but in all likelihood it is _not_ his personal favorite edition. The fact that he began working T5 while the T4 books were still warm from the press is a pretty good clue. (I sisnt find out about T5 until I was researching Mongoose Traveller, either.) Anyway, If you have the chance to pick it up (and eBay demonstrates it to be the single most expensive supplemental book for MegaTraveller), I strongly suggest using it to create your systems and worlds. The system for New Era isn't bad either. If you get the chance, snag Fire, Fusion, and Steel from New Era. With a couple of tweaks, it works well for any edition of Traveller, and helps you assign specific physical details to build vehicles is you are using a system that provides everyrhing _except_ actual physical details (like maybe HERO). Like Word Builders for Mega, FFS is probably the single best sourcebook for TNE. I cannot subtly get back onto the point here, so enjoy this subtle segue... Man, I really,need some,help designing a system for next week's game. Can I borrow your Scouts book? Most of my problems with system and world generation in CT via Scouts is resolved by remembering what Miller said about the rules being substitutes and cruthxes for creativity. I just buuld what I want in my head, then stat it out from the book. When I _truly_ want something "off the dice," as it were, or just don't have an idea that inspires me, I will roll it all up through Book 6, then tweak here and there (usually changing that white dwarf into something more believable). Anyway, I do hope you do get to read it, if only to experience 'the original game.' |
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Post by rravenwood on Jul 3, 2022 3:28:07 GMT
Thanks for the fair warning on Book 6 - I'll approach it with steely resolve 
The MegaTraveller World Builder's Handbook sounds interesting, but since it was published by DGP, not GDW, it's unfortunately one of the titles only available on Ebay and other used sources - no authorized PDF versions are available. You probably know the situation better than I, but the rights to the DGP stuff is being held tight by the current owner, who wants more money for them than Marc Miller is willing to shell out for. As you noted, it tends to go for high prices on Ebay, so I'll probably have to give it a pass. Maybe some breakthrough in that rights situation will happen... ha!
The photocopied world/system generation pages that I mentioned previously are - going back and looking - from the MegaTraveller Referee's Manual. As I seem to recall, I never actually played MegaTraveller; a friend had a copy, and I borrowed it just for the world generation stuff. All the subsequent iterations of the game from that until Mongoose Traveller 1st edition was totally off my radar. (Although I've read a bit about those intervening editions since.)
That being said, when I ordered the CD-ROMs from FFE, Marc sent some bonus material, one of which was a full copy of the T5 Worlds & Adventures volume, sent out as a freebie because it was mis-autographed or something like that. I haven't done more than quickly flip through the pages, but I suspect at some point down the road I'll break it out and do a comparison between it, Book 6, and my MegaTraveller photocopies, in regards to system/world generation... I'm just that way!
I do ultimately agree with the random generation systems being there to help when imagination runs low, but the random systems also just have their own appeal (to me, at least), divorced from the larger context of creating and running an RPG campaign. Traveller in particular contains a lot of "mini-games" which can be enjoyable in their own right - it could be fun to just roll up a bunch of characters to see what turns out, or to roll up a bunch of animal encounters, or worlds, etc. Mind you, I'm not saying that I'd want to sit and do that for hours day after day, but as an occasional "let's see what happens" way to kill a little time (and particularly with the spark to imagination that frequently accompanies it) it can be fun. (Bringing it back to HERO, ages ago I sometimes used to roll up characters using the Champions III random tables, for a similar what-the-hell downtime activity.)
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Duke
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Post by Duke on Jul 4, 2022 21:07:50 GMT
You are dead-on on the minigame aspect, and if you fall in with an active Traveller group, you likely _will_ 2nd up at some point rolling up dozens of characters, systems, and worlds "just because." It's a lot worse if you are someone like me, with several 3rd party gaming magazines that featured new career /life paths for your,characters to explore.... (Word,of warning: IBIS is out of bounds at my table: it is Nothing but a massive grab for bucket loads of combat-related skills and little else. Kind of wierd when you realize that _actual_ spies had long lists of everything but arm3d,combat skills....) Of,late, I have begun low-red scanning such articles into a single document, but the state of my computer is making even that work painfully slow (as I, "an hour or two per page). Honestly, right ,ow my computer is little more than a social media machine, but I really,cannot,justify replacing it at,least until the kids start back to school.... |
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Duke
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Post by Duke on Jul 7, 2022 2:55:38 GMT
Here's another example of "back in the day," though it edges into the modern age. I know it's a bit ahead of your reading, but it's a valid example:
Challenge Magazine #75, p66:
A complete listing of all the changes made to Fire, Fusion, and Steel (quite possibly the best supplement for TNE-- one of the best not just for Traveller, but comparing the value of the product for a GM, I feel it's one of the best supplements ever produced for any game. Not _the_ best when pushed to that scale, but definitely a "top 10" across gaming) between the first printing and the second. In short, it was a "freebie" that let you update the book you currently owned to the newest version.
Game companies used to do crap like that _a lot_, and GDW did it perhaps more routinely than any other company-- customer satisfaction meant a lot to them, in spite of them using Mega and TNE to kind of torpedo themselves amongst their own fandom. :/
Now as I mentioned in a different conversation (and possibly this one as well), I didn't collect Challenge very long (once "JTAS" stopped being its own section in the back, I lost interest in it), so I never new it was published there. I got my own update the hard way-- by purchasing the TNE boxed set (I already had the rulebook and FFS), which came with the rulebook, a map, the forms book, some dice, a copy of FFS, and the little update booklet.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the booklet wasn't really critical to using the original book-- I used my _for years_ (and still refer to it now and again) without applying any of the changes, so I'm guessing you'd have to some kind of detail nit-picker to actually "need" it.
Still, GDW made it available for the price of Challenge magazine, which was a buttload cheaper than buying the FFS updated version.
If I recall, JTAS did the same thing when High Guard got its update in the revised edition (for those wanting a slightly-less schizophrenic version of High Guard).
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Post by rravenwood on Jul 8, 2022 1:27:33 GMT
Man, July 4th really torpedoed my sleep, and then work has been nuts this week. So, just getting back here now... Yeah, I glanced at the IBIS article in Dragon #35 and just kept on walkin'. Maybe it would be okay for a campaign specifically centered around it (so all the PCs are on the same footing), but it and some of the other custom Traveller careers in the gaming mags sure seem to be products of the same "hey I can get my totally powerful class published and that makes it all-riiiight!" mindset which produced the infamous Anti-Paladin class for D&D (supposedly just for NPCs) which immediately became every Monty Haul munchkin's wet dream.
Yep, JTAS published the changes to High Guard in 3 parts, which was definitely the right thing to do for a book originally released only the year before. Since you mentioned "schizophrenic" and High Guard together, I assume you're referring to the original 1979 version there? I haven't gotten to the revised 1980 version yet, but generally speaking (I will pick up on details when I do read it) what do you think about the two versions? In your opinion does 1980 fix 1979? Or was 1979 okay by itself? I can't speak from actual play experience with it, but a read-through of 1979 didn't make me jump up and cry "what have you done, O! heathen fools?" Of course, I'm not in the camp of folks who debate over the fine points of ship/vehicle/doohickey design and their faithfulness to real-world physics, etc., so it's entirely possible that some whoppers just slid smoothly past me... |
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Duke
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Post by Duke on Jul 8, 2022 6:26:27 GMT
'79 works, but only for the main thrust of what the writer/publisher wanted at that time: it had a few updates to ship construction and ship combat (armor, etc). The problem- in my decidedly un-expert opinion- was two fold: They thought the new ideas were expressed more clearly than they actually were (you ever have to explain something to new guy, the suddenly you realized that you had to back up and start over because you left out a lot of stuff that you and everyone else already knew and just habitually assumed that the new guy already knew it, too? Same sort of vibe on the first read through of '79.) 2) the book tried to cover too many bases. I don't know if it just ended up short or what, but there is a "price point" on page count when you are doing saddle-stitched booklets. I think there was some fluff added-- the career tweaks, etc, and most of those seem to have suffered from not being proofread, taking us back to the whole "we assumed you would already get that" issue from reason 1. The second edition of High Guard is superior in every way to the fiery, in my own opinion. Way back in the day, it was- at least in my gaming community-- -THE_ supplement to have, if you only bought one. I don't think there was a Traveller ref I ever encountered who did not have it, even if it was the -only- supplement he had. For what it is worth, I made one tweak to the ship-building system that made trading more economically viable for smaller ships (like PCs might have). Any ship equipped with a Jump Drive that sufficient enough to exceed Jump 1 would use only use 1/2 the normal amount of fuel to make a jump of less than full capacity. That is to say that if you were outfitted for Jump3 (both Jump drive and power plant sufficient to run it), then doing a Jump2 would use only half the fuel that a Jump2 _should_ take. It seems "gimme" at first, but when you really study the rules as written, and run a few trading scenarios out on paper, it becomes pretty obvious that a 400 ton subsidized merchant -- or even a free trader-- will have to run full capacity with _zero issues_ to exactly break even. In my own opinion, this has a lot to do with why so many campaigns became endless mercantilism once the PCs had a boat of their own. Reducing fuel consumption meant a little less tonnage allocated for fuel, which meant a little more tonnage for cargo _and_ a smaller fuel bill. If you ever run across any of the old The Imperial Standard fanzines, there are some pretty interesting ideas for "small cargoes" (with or without smuggling) that you can throw in every now and again just to give the PCs a bit of bonus relief. I drew the idea from the truck I was driving at the time (I don't know if I have mentioned it, but when I was much, much younger, I used to move houses). The difference in fuel consumption between "loaded to capacity" and "not even enough load to notice" was quite appreciable. I would also allow DMs against failure for anyone with an oversize drive set up making a less-than-max Jump, as it just isn't working as hard as a "proper" sized drive. Given that I had real-world examples of increased fuel efficiency, and that bigger drives required higher tech levels, a radical change in fuel,consumption was not unreasonable. I felt the more expensive buy-in (bigger drives and power plant, etc) balanced it well enough, and still kept crews looking for cargo until they could get ahead of the mortgage. As it is possible to build ships so larges that they _can't_ get an oversized drive set up, it created a perfect niche for small private vessels to run single-line or other simplified trade routes even at Jump2 or3 and still make reasonable profit. (Kind of like 'hotshot' truck routes today). Best part,is it meant that there was no real panic about going on adventures: "we cant stop to help; we will never get back on top of the mortgage!" Was no longer the terrified chorus it once was. And finally: No. It did not unbalance the game at all. It actually removed a burden, and did so with no significant downside. Oh: I cut the fuel,usage for maneuver drive in half as well, without regard of the size. The only way to get better is to find whichever old fanzine published the Hieronymus Device. HA! Sorry-- if you haven't stumbled across it, the next bit is a spoiler (skip it if you don't want a spoiler. It runs to the end of the post, so....): The idea of the Hieronymus Device is that it chains Jump Drives in such a fashion that if one were running-- say, a Jump 3 and a Jump 2 drive in the same ship, the device would allow the larger drive to operate "to the power of" the second drive. In this example, Jump 3^2, or Jump 9. If one were running two Jump 4, then the result is Jump4^4, or Jump256. It sounds great, until you realize that to get any real benefit out of it, you're going to have to do something about fuel consumption or make external tanks very common in your setting, as anything more than Jump 2^2 is going to require a fuel supply that actually exceeds the entire tonnage of the hull...... There are a _few_ ships that can be finagled to Jump 3^2, but Jump 6^6 (Jump 46,656) just isn't going to happen without taking several ships worth of fuel with you, and good luck getting home on that Jump 3. |
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It was also the reason that every character had a previous career-- it was intended more to get you thinking about who your character was than anything else, and the reward was a couple of skills at which you were _extremely_ proficient, and they could be used in place of Characteristics rolls-- evidently he originally saw them as "bonus rolls" when you were really wanting to save that one particular Characteristic for a bigger challenge... His group quibbled a bit during the writing, and what 1e and 2e were was essentially the compromise that all involved could agree on.
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: Just because the published material has X-dozen different skill definitions doesn't mean a referee / GM can't cut that down to just what they want to deal with in their own game.
I have found that Mercenary has some errata buried away in the Ironmongery chapter (vehicle price reductions and armor TL corrections), and so won't be surprised if I find other nuggets tucked away in various books as I slowly proceed. As I probably mentioned in some previous message elsewhere, if GDW did make errata sheets and booklets available during the early Classic Traveller years, I'm surprised that references to and scans of such aren't in places such as the Traveller Wiki and RPGGeek.com. Floods of contemporary errata seem to be online for later games such as MegaTraveller, but as you opined to me once, formal errata just didn't seem to be a feature of the early RPG years.
